Hello, friends. It’s been a minute! My final masters class has been a slog, but I’m happy to report I’m basically done. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog.

A lot has been happening with Fair Haven Innovates – the 21st century life, innovation, and technology program I created and run – since I last wrote. So how about an update? This week, we’ll start with my 8th grade, student-run business FH Leads.

Make it real and make it relevant are the two core values I kept in mind when I was designing FH Leads, my 8th grade consulting firm. The more real and relevant a problem is to their lives, the more passion my 8th graders will have for solving it. To make FH Leads as meaningful as possible for students, I have to get them into the real world; kids need to interact with their community. So last year, I reached out to our local hospital, Riverview, about being our first client. They couldn’t have been more excited. Through last Christmas and into last summer, we planned what the FH Leads/Riverview partnership would look like.

I did a lot of research and spoke to a lot of educators about their school/institution partnerships. I learned a lot of best practices, but two areas in the school/institution partnership stuck out to me as areas I really wanted to improved upon with FH Leads. Many partnerships seemed to be centered around 1) fake or easy problems for students to solve and 2) most programs stopped the design process at prototyping. I don’t want fake or easy problems for my kids. I want real, hard problems. I’d rather have my students fail at solving a real, hard problem than solve an easy, manufactured problem. Further, the problem with stopping students at prototyping is that they never get to the test stage. There are a million valuable life lessons to be found in the test stage. None more important than students learning to reframe failure as iteration as they test their designs and learn from failure. I don’t just want to propose prototypes and hypotheticals to the hospital and have kids wondering what if… I want  them to be able to test and iterate on their designs at least once. I want design doing, not just design thinking. I told the hospital that 1) my kids needed their real, most pressing problems and 2) my kids need to test their solutions in the hospital with the people their prototypes affect. The hospital totally got it and agreed. We were off and running. 

School started and the first few weeks of FH Leads focused on three things: teaching students to use our design process, developing the core values of our company, and creating a mission statement to keep us mission driven.

Students came up with these core values and mission statement to guide our attitude and purpose in FH Leads:

Core Values

Hardwork Pays Off
Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
No Days Off
Try, Try Again
Ship It!
Be Mission Driven
Build Bridges Not Walls

Mission Statement

We are a student-run consulting firm. We give back to our community by using our design process to help local businesses grow. FH Leads will be the competitive advantage local businesses can’t wait to hire because they know when they hire us they are getting the tireless dedication and next-level innovation needed to grow their business. From our clients, we will learn more about careers and enrich our knowledge as we make a positive impact wherever we go.

After building our business culture, we started our 8 week design challenge with our first client, Riverview hospital! 4 weeks ago, Riverview sent the head of a different department to each one of my 5 FH Leads classes to deliver each class their own challenge.

Class 1: How might we improve the lost and found system when it comes to cell phones? Riverview told us that they spend thousands of dollars a year replacing patients’ lost and forgotten cell phones. They asked if my students could design a process and a product to help them help patients to not lose their phone when they are in the hospital. To prevent loss while in the hospital, students have been designing a boxes for patients to keep their cell phone in and experimenting with the best place to put the box since they decided it should be in arm’s reach of patients. Further, and if you’ve been a reader of this blog for awhile you know how exciting this part is for me: I turned students on to nudge theory to find ways to help remind patients to take their cell phones and chargers with them when they’re discharged.

Class 2: How might we find a way to improve Riverview’s wheelchair tracking system? Students were fascinated to learn that busy nurses often hide wheelchairs in closets and showers, rather than returning them, since they are in such high demand. This was a big empathy lesson for students because at first they couldn’t wrap their heads around nurses “stealing” wheelchairs. But when our speaker told students what the typical day is like for a nurse, things became more clear. Most students in this class have started to develop a way to use the Raspberry Pi and RFID to track wheel chairs that can then be retrieved by volunteers.

Class 3: How might we help lost visitors find their way around the hospital by creating an all volunteer escort service and improving Riverview’s map of the hospital? One particularly clever student brought up that Disney likely put a fortune into designing the perfect map for theme parks. Since then, this class had been redesigning the hospital map as if it were a Disney map. Really cool stuff. I just need to do a better job in reminding them about the volunteer escort service part.

Class 4: How might we improve patients’ dignity by redesigning the hospital gown and sending patients home in clean clothes? Patients sometimes come to the hospital in soiled clothing. Riverview asked us to design a process for buying or cleaning these patients clothes so they can leave the hospital feeling and looking good. Further, while in the hospital many patients don’t wearing like the gowns. Students have been modeling the gowns and coming up with new ways to keep all of a patient’s vital areas

accessible to hospital staff while not leaving patients “butts blowing in the wind.” In the last class, there was debate among groups over who was going to learn how to sew. I’m excited to see some final products for this one! Like in Class 3, I need to do a better job reminding them to work on the clean-clothes process.

Class 5: How might we improve the phlebotomy process for younger patients who need to have blood drawn? The head of phlebotomy came in and explained to students how hard it is to draw blood from a panicked patient. Students have been designing “blinds” and other products to help with the blood drawing process. I was particularly proud of this class as they came up with the unique idea of developing preventive measures to calm patients down as they acknowledged the role that “the unknown” plays in fear. They believe if they can better inform young patients about what to expect, they will panic less when it is time to give blood.

I’m hoping through this eight week warm up with Riverview I can improve students creative confidence as they 

use our design process to solve these wicked problems. Creative confidence is still a work in progress. I was surprised, and maybe I shouldn’t have been, that many students didn’t think they had much to offer the hospital. They didn’t see themselves having the ability to make a difference. When they heard the problems the hospital proposed, some felt it was out of their power to solve them. I hope I can continue to encourage them and help them understand they can make a difference. 

I imagine my kids starting to learn about our design process in 4th and 5th grade through The Innovation Lab and their time with me would culminate in FH Leads. I wanted students to get out into the real world and work with real people and hear about their real problems. I always say if my kids leave my program have developed empathy for others and understanding that a design process can be used to solve all of life’s problems, I’ve done my job. I’ve started down this long road, but I think it is a road worth traveling. After this next eight weeks, FH Leads will start working with nineteen local business who have agreed to hire my FH Leads students for a 20 week design intervention. I’m so confident my kids have something to offer everyone, I said FH Leads will work for free this year to build our portfolio, but next year we’re charging! 

Until Next Time,

GLHF